Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer

Investigate a twisted serial killing case as struggling private investigator Kathy Rain, in a new adventure set three years after the first game.

Featuring fantastic voice acting, excellent puzzles and a narrative that keeps you gripped, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer deserves a place in the point-and-click adventure hall of fame. Those who prefer grounded, realistic stories might rue its sharp turn into cosmic horror towards the end, but it's hardly a dealbreaker.

As an old-school adventure game Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer works, but you'll need to bear with some of its quirks.

Nearly a decade after Clifftop Games launched their gritty, Twin Peaks-inspired detective game Kathy Rain, the punk detective is back for another, darker case in Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer. It's a classic point-and-click adventure game, but also a detective game more grounded in realism than the likes of Phoenix Wright. If you want to learn something in Kathy Rain 2, you'll have to ask the right questions or trawl through old newspapers to do it, and that's a good thing. Less good is how underdeveloped everything else feels. Kathy Rain 2 wants to be like the good ol' noir thrillers of yesteryear...

All of these facets weave together to make Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer one of the most engrossing adventures I've played in a long while. It's heavily reliant on extending the narrative of its forebear, however, and like the Kathy Rain 1 Director's Cut, many of its more interesting twists and turns exist to iron out the rough patches of plot from the first game. But sequels don't necessarily need to be fully standalone experiences, and you can probably blast through both Kathy Rain 1 and 2 in th...